Van

“As one formerly enslaved man succinctly put it, “white men got plenty chilluns by the nigger women. They didn’t ask them. They just took them.”76 Sexual desire and obsession, backed by racial and male privilege and pride, often led to physical brutalization for those who dared to resist. “Granny,” who had been enslaved in Alabama, recalled that she never developed anything close to a romantic, or even emotionally supportive, relationship with her owner who was the father of her five children. Always afraid that she would be tortured if she refused him, Granny revealed, “I didn’t want him, but I couldn’t do nothin’. I uster say,”
― Daina Berry, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

“Leon enjoyed working on interesting and seemingly insurmountable problems, regardless of the subdiscipline. He would fearlessly tackle the most difficult issues or even correct long-held misconceptions and paradigms in other fields such as radiation physiology, neuroscience, and philosophy. During the time I spent working in the Cooper group, Leon was working in the field of neuroscience. And so it was that I began life as a graduate student in physics studying the brain. Who would have thought computational neuroscience would turn me into a cosmologist?”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“century America was a country, wrote Fritsch, that had finally learned the error of its egalitarian ways: “America, soaked in ideas of freedom and equality, has hitherto accorded equal rights to all races. But it finds itself compelled to revise its attitudes and its laws and create restrictions on Negroes and Chinese.”82 To Fritsch, the history of American immigration law offered a parable on the dangers of ignoring race in favor of a foolish egalitarianism. As we shall see shortly, Hitler and other Nazis would often repeat Fritsch’s interpretive line.”
― James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

“True, viruses are nothing more than a tiny bit of genetic material—a single kind of nucleic acid (segmented or nonsegmented, DNA or RNA) and a coat made of protein molecules. Viruses multiply according to the information contained in this nucleic acid. Everything other than the DNA or RNA is dispensable and serves primarily to ensure that the viral nucleic acid gets to the right place in the right sort of cell in the organism hosting the virus. Viruses”
― Michael B.A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present and Future